My good friend and speaker-building mentor, Tom Sommons bought one of our Model 403 Stereo Phono Preamps in 2002. He though it sounded great -- "very quiet and very musical." But it had one disadvantage to him: it didn't support moving coil cartridges. He had a Van den Hul MC-1 in one of his systems and he thought "it was the best cartridge ever built." So we designed and built the first 4041 for Tom and his MC-1. Although he had a dozen or so phono preamps, both vacuum tube and solid state, he liked the 4041 best. He thought "it was quieter and more musical" than any of the others. Just one man's opinion, but perhaps worth considering.

We included both a battery and a main power supply in the 4041 as a test of whether we could hear any difference. In Tom's system there was no difference but he had exceptionally clean power: solar cells charging a set of lead acid batteries running a 60 Hz, sine wave inverter. In general, I can't here any difference either but our mains power is also rather clean. You may be able to hear a difference, it depends on a bunch of variables. If you can run on mains power, all the better. But you do have a choice.